Power-Less Over Presentations

As I walked to the prospect's office, I thought "What am I doing here?". I had set up a meeting to demonstrate my text-processing wizardry to a graphics consulting firm. They don't use Intel-Windows, they use Macs. Who knows if my Word 2000 templates would ever run successfully, even if I could convince the owner of my value.

"Hi!" and into the boardroom. Out of the bag comes my trusty Intel/Windows laptop, the mouse, and no power-block. The power-block is in my office five miles away.

Oops!

Hi. I'm a computer expert, and I left the power-block at home. And the battery has been unchargeable for over a year.

The good news is that I had brought with me two copies of a 1-sheet handout, a script for the demonstration I had planned, AND part of it was in colored characters to demonstrate my Color macros.

"If it ain't written down, it don't exist". So true!

Armed then with a 1-sheet handout, my dulcet tones, much hand-waving, and a brilliant and attentive (and very forgiving owner of a Graphics Design company) I delivered a truncated 20-minute version of my 15-minute hands-on demonstration.

She believed my figures, I think, but there's no substitute fro seeing an index appear before your eyes in 15 seconds (nominally a 2- to 3-hour manual task).

She did ask me about document conversion, and did show me some manuals they had prepared, and did mentions that they might need help with document cleansing and table manipulation (I do those!), so I can follow-up with some future benefits.

And best of all - I had a meeting with a prospect, someone I'd been referred to by a colleague I'd not met, and I did a demonstration, of sorts.

I should get out more.

I did, and it was a good step in the right direction.

The journey is long, but interesting.